Robotik und Künstliche Intelligenz

Traffic

The good news is, that Stackoverflow makes its simple to follow a certain topic. The AI topic has it’s own tag and the search engine can give back the latest postings: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence So nice so good. The problem is that the AI topic is special inside Stackoverflow, it seems that nobody is really interested in it. The users are asking only a few questions, and the admins are putting question very fast “on hold”. Let us monitoring the questions of the last week a bit in detail. Today is February 11, 2018:

The average number of postings per day is around 4. No that is not a joke. The stackoverflow website with around 10 million visits per day is not very often used for discussion problems in AI. Today we have for example 3 questions: two about Tensorflow and one about a cost-function in machine learning. The first of the Tensorflow questions was put on hold by the admin, because the user wrotes only 3 sentences in which he announced, that he wants to train a neural network. Which may be legitimate but the stackoverflow community needs a bit more information.

If we are scrolling through the other day, we say that every day around 3-5 questions are asked. The equal pattern is, that very often the question gets downvoted. Sometimes the question gets a -1, but sometimes a -3 and even a -7. In general it seems, that the AI topic is not very welcome at Stackoverflow. Either the users are downvoting the questions, or the admin put the post on hold for “further investigation” which is equal that the question will not get any further attention.

I do not see any kind of wrong behavior by the users or the admins. It seems to be a general pheromone, that AI related problems are not welcome in the programming community. Here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48683891/how-to-improve-tensorflow-model-accuracy I found a typical example. The question starts with a short posting of a user. He is not motivated to write a longer text, or to explain in detail what he wants to do. Perhaps he knows, that asking a question about AI is in general a wrong behavior. And he is right, his question is not welcome. The Stackoverflow users are downvoted the post with -8. As a consequence, the SO admin sees the downgrade, looks at the question and reinforce his community with setting the hole question “on hold”. From a content level, the OP wants to know something about tensorflow and recognizing images.

The list goes on with that pattern. It is every day the same game. Around 3-5 questions are posted, most of them get downvotes, sometimes the admin comes with further “on hold” flags and the users are frustrated. Over the complete lifespan from the beginning of stackoverflow, not more than 4611 questions are posted about “Artificial Intelligence”. It seems, that the topic is the most hated and most downvoted topic ever. The funny thing is, that SO in general is a very good programming forum. For example the tag c# has over 1M questions, #PHP too, and the subject “Android” was discussed in the same scope. So what is wrong with AI? I have absolutely no idea, but it seems, that programmers are not very familiar with the topic. At first they are asking beginner question, and then they are downvoting the stupid questions asked by others, or simply they are ignoring them.

The pattern for reproducing this behavior is simple. Somebody must ask a normal AI -related question. Perhaps 2 paragraphs with a slightly interesting topic and it is very likely the question gets at least a -2 downvote and perhaps even an “on hold” flag from the admin.

Answers

Not only questions about AI seems complicated, but the answers are missing also in quality. Let us scroll through the questions of the last month and check for the number of answers:

The normal pattern is, that 3 question get 0 answers, than a question get an answer, and so forth. So in general 75% of the question get no answer. The good news at stackoverflow is, that they have an elaborated search-feature which gives detailed statistics about the number of answered questions:

In the language of Online-Marketing a high-visibility is everything. The idea is to get as much attention as possible. And the experts are right, because it is rational to increase the impact of content. If it is possible to get an audience of 100 people, it is better in the numbers than only 2. Most social media fanatics are convinced, that social networks are the only way of increasing the visibility. That is only true for mainstream products, for example a newspaper which provides information about celebrities. Other “special interest” content is surprisingly not suited for social networks. Instead it is better so search for special communities which give a much higher attention.

I want to give two example. Suppose we have written an encyclopaedic article about a robotics problem. If we are converting this article into the PDF Format and posting it to Facebook it won’t work. According to the numbers, Facebook has 2 billion users worldwide, but the guess is, that this pdf paper will read by none of them. The better place for posting such content is Wikipedia itself. They have experts which reads through the article and decide if it’s good or not. The interesting thing is, that according to the number the Wikipedia audience is much smaller. Only 15k Wikipedia authors are active over a month, and from them only 20 will read through the article. But at the end, it makes more sense, to post the article there than anywhere else.

The second example could be a small question about a robotics subject. There are two options. The first one is to post the question into a Google Plus group. My guess is, that Google Plus has around 400M active users, but this special topic will get not answer. It is the same problem like in Facebook. Technical it is possible that the post is read by millions of people, but the content is wrong. On google Plus other content works better, it must be suited for the mass.

So where is the right place for posting a robotics question? A dedicated robotics Online-forum. Such forum have much lower traffic, but they are ranked very good by Google, because many people are interested in the information.

What can we learn from both examples? Not every piece of content gains a high attention in the social networks. It is possible to get high traffic on Facebook, but only if the content fits into the social network. For special topics from science or programming background that is not the case. Even Google Plus is the wrong place for such content. Instead, such content should be posted to online-forums and Wikipedia-like websites. The number of users and also the daily traffic is much lower, but the advantage is, that the people there are interested in the content. On the other hand, not every type of content is well suited for Wikipedia. For example, if a newspaper has a story about a celebrity it is bad idea, to modify the Wikipedia page in the hope, that the audience will like this. Instead, a Facebook page is the better place for doing so.

But we can learn another lesson from the example. Marketing experts are not false in every case. Because, the above cited examples were described with a marketing perspective. Because, the content-producer is interested in finding the best audience for a given content. And deciding against Facebook but for Wikipedia is a marketing-related decision.

How can we describe this phenomena more abstract? I think it is important to separate between the content and it’s distribution. The content is the encyclopaedic article. But the article itself is useless, what he needs is the right audience. And maximizing the impact on the audience has to do with social-media-marketing.

The first impression about Robotics and Artificial Intelligence is, that both topics are core of the internet and are welcome everywhere. But in reality, it is easier to sell shoes as getting traffic on robotics website. No, i do not want promote my own blog. I’m fair enough to understand, that other people have better content. But let us take a look at the best online-forum for robotics. According my investigation it is https://ai.stackexchange.com/ And yes, we can debate if the website is really cool, or which website is better. So perhaps I’m wrong and in reality there is a better website out there. Suppose, that the above cited URL is really the best site. What does it means? According to Archive.org the website reached in July 2017 a daily trafficcount of around 300 visits per day. To number today are better, but with 750 visits per day not really high. In contrast, an ordinary weblog driven by a single person has around 50 visits per day in traffic, without any SEO technique.

And the AI.stackexchange is not a small unknown domain, they have the huge stackoverflow network behind them with enormous audience. But it seems, that the website has a massive trafficproblem. So what is wrong with the world? I don’t know. But it seems, that it is not possible to get traffic for certain topics, for example Artificial Intelligence. It seems, that from a marketing perspective and by the audience too, such topics are not attractive.

I would understand this, if the above cited forum is full of advertisement, has bad content or other problems. But nothing of them is the case. Instead, the website is a well moderated forum, has high-quality content on university level and is very user friendly. But it seems this is the problem. The website is to good, the people don’t understand the sense, they are watching different websites like Facebook, which have bad content, lots of ads, but looks more familiar to them.

Like I mentioned above, we can debate about the question, if another website is better. For example, i found another website which has also AI as a topic, http://www.ai-forum.org/ But my prediction is, that this website will have the same problems. Very good content, no ads, and low traffic. It seems, that the topic AI is the problem. It is not possible to sell it to a broad audience. The people are in fear of it, they ignore it, and they are not interested in reading or posting anything.

Usually, the number of 750 visits per day can be called a joke. Because, an online-forum has in most cases much more traffic. An online-forum is per definition a high traffic website, which is populated by hundreds of users. If we are looking on AI.stackexchange nobody is posting there. In the last 2 days, only 4 new postings were created.

The phenomena is not completely new. If we are increasing the content quality further up to Google Scholar and the documents there, we see, that the traffic can be much lower. A well written paper from a worldwide known professor reaches in most cases not more than 50 visits over the livespan of 10 years. That means, apart from the professor itself and 2 of his students nobody is interested in the content. It seems, that onlnie-marketing works for every subject, but not for high-quality content. And again, in the case of an academic paper we can debate about a certain paper, the question is not, how to promote a certain paper, the question is more, why all papers generate low traffic.

Even marketing experts do not understand the subject in detail. They are only familiar in selling normal products like cars, houses and clothes but not products which have to do with knowledge. From an abstract point of view, a robotic forum in which the users are discussion about ways to automate the industry is more valuable, than any motorcar in the world. But it seems, that this is not widely known. Instead car companies are working with huge budgets for ads while academic papers or robotics discussion groups are ignored.

Relative attention

The work hypothesis is, that every subject has a maximum in daily traffic. For example, all website about cars have cumulative around 1 million visits per day. And all website about robotics only 10k per day. What online-marketing can do is only get more from relative attention, and this is missing by another website from the same subject.